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Even after several decades of attention to her work, Flannery O'Connor's critics can be grouped into those who read her primarily through a theological lens and those who focus primarily on her regional identification. If theological readings tend to dilute the cultural specificity of O'Connor's work, “southern” readings of O'Connor tend to reduce her religious concerns to a mere by-product of the South's “Christ-haunted” cultural context. Implicit in both kinds of readings is the notion that O'Connor is an anomalous figure, central both to southern and Catholic literary traditions, but comfortably situated in neither. O'Connor, however, saw her identities as southerner and Catholic neither as complementary nor as merely additive. By identifying the “best traditions” of the South and the church as “the same”, O'Connor suggests that one should not be deceived by the widespread anti-Catholicism of the twentieth-century Protestant South.

The planter as kindly lord of the manor is a familiar trope in nineteenth-century southern literature — pastoral and paternalist are the standard adjectives used to describe this characterization — and its relation to a proslavery ideology that would equate the plantation system with feudalism has been widely recognized. Southern partisans, both in literature and politics, tended to view both slavery and the tightly controlled republican government that protected it as extensions of the patriarchal family. What has been less recognized is that for many southern apologists, this “medievalist” ideology ultimately required a religious grounding. The irruption of “history” into medieval Christendom under the rubrics of Enlightenment, Reformation, secularization and emerging capitalism could only be combated by the recovery or preservation of medieval principles — one of which was the totalizing and hierarchical ordering epitomized in the Great Chain of Being and underwritten by Roman Catholicism.

World War I brought southerners into contact with modernity at a distance, but World War II brought modernity to the South. The inherent tension between the South’s rural, agricultural social structure and the urbanizing, industrializing processes of modernity generated a distinctive form of distal modernism in the work of southern writers after World War I. After World War II, however, the South itself began modernizing, becoming more urban and more industrial and leading many southerners to adopt mainstream American social practices. As the South became a proximal site of modernity, it became less distinctive as a region, southern identity became a less stable construction, and southern literature became more consistent with mainstream American literature.

This chapter compares dandyism in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern literature, focusing on Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn. It argues that in these two texts, considered as foundational in the Irish big house and southern plantation novel traditions, the dandy figure's cultural and sexual decadence threatens colonial aristocracy. The chapter suggests that a common merger of aesthetics and proactive reform links the Anglo-Irish big house and Southern plantation novel literary traditions from their inception.

The public criticism of the South was not limited to religious fundamentalism, but spread to southern art and letters and culture in general. This chapter focuses on the Fugitive poets of Nashville, Tennessee—Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. These Fugitives expressed, in their correspondence and in their writings, their sense of alienation and their quest for recognition. Their aesthetic and political choices reflected a shared sense of inferiority and their struggle to overcome it and to secure acceptance and acknowledgment in the literary world.

This chapter discusses Brad Watson's 2002 novel The Heaven of Mercury, which lies squarely amid the matrix of evolving and competing Souths. It has recently become standard at conferences and in journals devoted to southern literature to ask whether southern literature itself is still a distinct category. For scholars in new southern studies, “southern” literature includes work produced as far from the old Confederacy as Caribbean and Central American nations, while critics have declared that novels as canonically New England as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) unconsciously depend upon an antebellum southern agrarian ideal. A native of Mississippi who spent time in Florida, Watson is by rights a true southerner, without such common qualifiers as “adopted” or “expatriate” to dilute his pedigree.

This chapter examines the transatlantic friendship between Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen, which provides invaluable insights into the aesthetic and intercultural transactions between Irish and southern literature, specifically through their oeuvre of short stories and their critical insights into the form. It shows how the often-asserted cultural compatibility of the Irish and southern literary renaissances might be perceptual and coincidental, shortchanging the individuality of writers who offer their personal maturation as a model for regional and national regeneration.

In his 2007 book The Fire This Time, North Carolina author Randall Kenan associates comics with sex and sin. This relationship is evident in his postmodern prose novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989), where Horace Cross, a gay African American teenager in a conservative religious community, struggles to articulate what he feels is the consummate sin of his queer sexual desires. This chapter examines A Visitation of Spirits and the protagonist’s attempts to imagine an alternative way of being in the world, suggesting the dense imbrication of visual and oral cultures of the South. It provides an overview of the connection between comics and oral literature within the framework of Kenan’s novel and the way orality remains a powerful marker by which to characterize southern literature.

This chapter examines the resonance of the English picturesque in the U.S. South, arguing that while southern appreciators of landscape during the antebellum period admired the picturesque for reasons similar to their northeastern counterparts, the aesthetic also resonated in the slave-holding south for its conservative semiotics of labor, which suppressed viewer’s sympathetic responses to impoverished rural workers by idealizing them or keeping them in the distance. John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel Swallow Barn (1832, 1851) registers a southern picturesque mode of the James River Valley of Upper Virginia, where indeed the euphemistic properties of the picturesque licenses an idealizing view of slavery. Interestingly, however, Kennedy’s novel not only indebts itself to the picturesque but also subverts its formulae in repeatedly violating its strictures on middle ground and distant space, drawing the reader into landscapes normally left unexplored in picturesque painting. In the process, the novel challenges the economies of slavery the southern picturesque would otherwise enjoin.

This chapter explores the writing of Kate Chopin, focusing on her novel The Awakening. It argues that while Chopin is not technically a southerner and The Awakening does not always “feel” like a southern novel, both writer and text were shaped by the very specific contexts of southern literature. By setting her novel in south Louisiana, Chopin was also engaging issues critical to southern identity.

This chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of southern writers who are giving voice to a different group of southerners, forcing their readers to reexamine long-held stereotypes and beliefs while challenging the literary roles traditionally assigned poor whites. According to Linda Tate, “traditionally, southern literature has been understood to be that written by white men and, on rare occasions, by white women—and, in almost all cases, by and about white southerners of the upper middle class.” This chapter looks at three new voices who write about the Rough South and the southern poor whites from within the class: Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Timothy Reese McLaurin. The term “Rough South” refers to as the world of the redneck or white trash. The terms “redneck,” “white trash,” “cracker,” and “poor white” have all been used to describe certain white southerners.

This chapter attempts to provide a definition for a Southern woman writer. It asks: Who or what is a Southern woman writer? Should the emphasis be placed on Southern or on woman, or equally on both? An examination of writers who are or have been considered Southern yields the following attributes. One is that place of birth in itself is not a major factor in determining a Southern writer. More important than place of birth is the place central to the individual writer’s formative years. Hence, a writer whose imagination is nurtured by the South becomes a Southern writer. The Southern writer also sees himself or herself as being different.

Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. Writers such as Walker Percy and Barry Hannah, who deal with a more urban world than Faulkner does, have occasionally had a hard time with many traditional critics who believe that they represent a decline in “southern literature.” These are the same critics who have too often lumped Eudora Welty and Faulkner together, who have argued that their literary strengths lie directly in their roots in the South. One of Faulkner’s most intimate works, the quasi-autobiographical “Mississippi” (1953), depicts his attempts to grapple with the problems and pressures his native land had caused for him, as well as his reconciliation with past and present Mississippi. The questions of how and why love is better than hate, reconciliation better than alienation, are also present in Welty in general, and in her novel The Golden Apples in particular. However, Welty’s responses to such questions are quite different from those of Faulkner.

This chapter discusses how southern communities that perceived themselves to be under siege retreated physically, artistically, or politically and established a new defiant reality. They also grounded this reality in the textual authority of the Bible, the literary work, or the Constitution, respectively. This alternate sense of authority acted as an anchor, to which these white southerners held tightly, in a storm of change and uncertainty.

This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s.

This chapter examines the legacy of southern frontier humor beyond the southern local color tradition by focusing on the trickster. It shows the reemergence of the trickster as con artist in contemporary southern literature, thus continuing the legacy of a Euro-American counterpart, a literary cross of the traits of both Jack and antebellum southern rogues such as Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood. The chapter looks at tricksters in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama (1997) and Georgia Bottoms (2011), and Clyde Edgerton’s Walking Across Egypt (1987), Killer Diller (1991), and The Bible Salesman (2008).